Incredibly it’s now 40 years since the release of Duran Duran’s debut album. To mark this event, the remaining members of the band’s classic line-up decided to return to Birmingham. Not to the NIA or any similar-sized venue, but for a couple of intimate gigs at the city’s O2 Institute.

Five weeks have passed since the death of opera director Graham Vick from complications due to Covid-19, shocking even to those of us (un)prepared for the worst, and yet so many of us think about him every day.

Nominally, this was a programme of three symphonies. The first, though, sounded like music re-cut and pasted from a very British film and the second was a suite, albeit impressively reworked, from an opera.

The love of power corrupts, the power of love falters or fails.

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra believes that its current post-lockdown summer series features the largest orchestra currently performing live in the UK. It’s not an easy claim to verify, and the full string section certainly wasn’t on stage for this matinee performance under the orchestra’s associate conductor Michael Seal.

“This year was supposed to be so very different” said Stephen Maddock, Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra when he spoke to theartsdesk earlier this year. Talk about an understatement. The CBSO has hardly been alone in having cherished plans wrecked.

Let’s start by echoing Simon Rattle’s sense of “how lucky we are”, in our case to be able to share with a 75-piece City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra its centenary to the very day, and celebrate the programme, the performers, the front man too (that superlative actor Adrian Lester, born in Birmingham to Jamaican immigrants). The overall presentation, alas, not so much.

Birmingham emerged from musical lockdown with Stockhausen. It couldn’t have been anyone else, really.

Given the collaborator list on this album, it should be a bit of a mess. Brit punks IDLES, Aussie woozy pop auteur Tame Impala, pumping bassline house producer Chris Lorenzo turning his hand to drum’n’bass, as well as Ms Banks, Dapz On The Map, Oscar #Worldpeace and a host of other UK rap talents all add their distinct musical personalities to the mix.

It’s begun: very limited access to live music, the chance to sit before one or two players in the same room – as we were doing only three and a half months ago, in some cases thousands of us before an orchestra of up to a hundred musicians.